I’m starting to write this post when Ignite 2018 is approaching the end, so the time is preparing for a summary. A year ago, when I wrote about Ignite 2017, I thought that the conference was presenting revolution solutions to the market in many areas. I had a sense of wow – maybe because I was in the USA for the first time 🙂 . But I’m a passionate Microsoft fan for a long time.

Now the conference is still great, but there’s no something amazing.

The guiding idea was digital transformation. If anyone interested in you read more under this link.

Ignite 2018

Ignite 2018 – evolution yes, revolution not

I will start with Keynote and Satya Nadella’s speech. Maybe I am exaggerating, but I had the impression that the Microsoft’s CEO has an hour on stage and must somehow fill it. Really. And many other people said that his speech was completely bland. Adobe and SAP alliance in the field of shared use of data? So far, no details, so it’s hard to say anything more.

Keynote

Charitable programs are important and needed, but where are all those crazy things for geeks here? Besides zero particulars as for me.

Cortana – are you still alive?

Office 365 and SharePoint are my main interests, but honestly, nothing has failed me as the lack of any major news or announcements that would apply to assistant Microsoft Cortana. It will be Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise, but what about me?

Some time ago I turned it on in my Windows 10 thinking that it might be an interesting experience. Nothing of that. Cortana really can do very little, and what’s more, she sometimes works, and sometimes not – you can scream Hey Cortana, and she will be like a deaf. And I heard a news that earlier or later, Alexa will permanently reside in Windows 10. Already, some of the laptops sold in the US have Alexa installed.

Office 365, MS Teams, Flow and Azure – must have

For anyone who was on site or watched Ignite 2018 it was clear that those technologies are Microsoft’s future and core business in the years to come. Already, Microsoft Teams have all the functionalities of Skype for Business, and new options are added all the time. It is very cool to be able to create your own solutions using the SharePoint Framework. You can see that all these technologies are penetrating more and more and are starting to form a very coherent ecosystem. For example, it will be possible to write a bot to which we will be able to call from the Teams level and ask questions. Cool 🙂 !

Soon, Microsoft (November of this year) Microsoft Teams will be available in the Graph API.

I also like the direction Flow goes. It is not a perfect technology, but the possibilities that appear in it are really impressive. For example, a process that reads incoming emails from attached PDFs and extracts personal data and loads them, for example, into Microsoft Dynamics. It’s really awesome.

A few beads at the end

From other things I remembered is a broadcast in Microsoft Stream. This can be a cool option in a large company when you want to make a live streaming event. Another great feature is the ability to search a recordings for a phrase. So imagine that you have a recording from a meeting at Microsoft Teams and you are looking for a word that has been spoken. Works great. What’s more, this option is also available in OneDrive.

Smart hints in the Office suite. In a big simplification, this means that AI analyses our document and proposes solutions that will make it better. I saw it live. Sometimes there are very cool effects.

PowerShell. I was in one session and I will tell you how to take off. I do not remember its number right now, but anyone who has any contact with PowerShell should see it. It was run by guys who belong to the product team. PowerShell is open source at the moment, and the new version (6.1) brings, among others, the ability to manage cross-platform. Chad.

But it is also not about knowledge in this case. The way of conducting this session was ewesome. Anyone who wants to or should have a presentation should see how professionals do it.

What’s next?

Well, that’s probably enough. I encourage everyone to watch the session recordings, they should be available soon. Of course, some of them are a waste of time, but many of them are worth every minute. You can learn a lot, and what’s more, you can have a lot of new ideas for implementation in your organization. That’s why I love Ignite. After 5 days, I have my head studded with ideas and inspiration. And it’s time to Ignite 2018 attendee celebration. A year ago it was superb so I hope that this time I will play like a child again.

Just few days ago Microsoft announced that his latest application for Office 365 – Microsoft Planner is going live. I was using it during preview time with my team and I have to say that it’s awesome! If you have Office 365 you will get solution which allow increase your team productivity. From my point of view Microsoft Planner is very simple team management software, which also allow us to make simple project management. It similar to other products on the market like Trello or Slack.

Short presentation how to use Microsoft Planner

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If your Office 365 subscriptions which allow you to use it, you should see it in your office 365 app launcher. Let’s run it. That’s how start screen looks like:

Microsoft planner start

Let see how to create our plan. It’s very simple, we just need to enter plan name and decide if our plan become public or no. After that just press “Create plan” and we are ready to go.

New Plan

When you create new plan Office 365 create for your several things for you:

Notes – dedicated OneNote space,

Calendar – project calendar

Group email and Group people – group members working on the plan

OneDrive for the plan.

Also we get dedicated e-mails address to the plan – it’s not require any work from IT team… Let’s create our first task in our plan. Just press + icon, and enter task name. Also you can assign person to the task and setup due date. It can be set up later too. It’s up to you.

First Planner Task

Now press the task tile, you will see grouped all stuff related to the task. We can do following things here:

Set up status

Start and end task date

Assign task to someone else

Add attachments

Create check list for the task

Add comments.

Planner Task details

When we add documents for the task they will be saved to dedicated OneDrive space. Also we can make conversion with our plan members. Members will be notified if something new happen in our plan. When you go charts for specific plan you can see progress for all in the plan, it allows you to have quick view how things are going.

Be default when you go to planner hub you will see all your plans. But there’s very nice feature. If you add any plan to favourites you will get also in planner hub those charts with progress. As you can see colours on the charts are standardized, you can very easy find out how all your plans works. You just take a look and you can see which plan require your attention.

Favourite plans

And that’s all. As you can see application is very simple, but still give us a lot of things, in very simple way. It very important when you have to work with non it people. They don’t need huge project/task systems like Jira or Mantis. They need something simple and I think that Microsoft Planner is very good solution for this.

Install of Office 2016 ProPlus hangs very often, as I saw for last two days… This post will be rather short, but I think that it could be very useful for someone… For last two days I was trying to install Office 2016 Pro. Yes, that’s right. Something what usually should take approximately 10 minutes… Install of Office 2016 Pro Plus hangs and sometime it’s very difficult to solve this problem. But please let me start from the begging. Finally I’ve decided to install Windows 10 on my own PC. It was fast and simple, nothing fancy and then all updates has been applied, so we can assume that it was clean install. Than I started installation of Office 2016 Pro Plus, as I get it from my BizSpark subscription. It was ISO file with, both 32 and 64 bits installation options, so there was nothing to download from Microsoft. Yes, I know that it could try to download updates during installation. And everything was looking fine, but after sometime I have discover that installation progress is still at 80 %. I was waiting for one hour, but finally I have decided to reboot. And then I stared again. In this case Install of Office 2016 ProPlus hangs at 90%. And then I was trying so many options to solve this problem…
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run sfc/scannow – it was no effect for me.

I don’t have an HP 4500 or HP 8500 OfficeJet printer -but to be sure I stopped the spooler service during installation

I switched off antivirus software

I removed partially installed Office 2016 and then I was trying again. Still Install of Office 2016 ProPlus hangs…

I was trying to clear temp folder…

And in my case all above and some other didn’t work!!! But, finally I saw post that someone had two installation processes: one for 32 bit and second for 64. And that was a clue! My ISO file has two option, one for 32 and the second 64 bit. I don’t know what’s rule is, but Microsoft always suggested to use 32 bit. Maybe something has change, I don’t know. I stated installation as always from setup file. And it was up to installation process to make the choice. So I have decided to change approach and make decision by my own. I dig in and I found the setup file which was dedicated for 64 bit installation only. And then after 5 minutes my Office 2016 Pro has been installed! Miracle…

Free Pluralsight Courses

Are you owner of the MSDN subscription? Microsoft and Pluralsight just announced that as subscriber we get new benefit: Free Pluralsight Courses . See below table with details

Free PluralSight courses

Pluralsight is the world’s largest tech training library, providing online courses for professional developers and IT administrators .

More details you will find on this channel 9 video. In this video you’ll learn about this new training benefit, including the courses you have access to, course examples, learning features, and how to activate your Pluralsight subscription. You’ll also hear from Aaron Skonnard, CEO of Pluralsight, about the mission of his company.
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Introduction to Office 365 Development

If want to start Office 365 Development I have good news for you. On Friday Microsoft Virtual Academy is starting new training related to Office 365 development. You can register at the following link. If you’re a web developer, the Office 365 platform gives you the opportunity to reach these users with your business solutions, automate the day-to-day solutions, and even create custom solutions.
And Instructor Team:

BizSpark is free program dedicated to startups and created by Microsoft. I have wrote about it a few times (here, here and here), but a few days ago someone ask me a few new questions. So right now I would like to write a few new things according to BizSpark, as the program is totally worth of it! BizSpark provides free software, support, and visibility to help startups succeed. It has been build similar to MSDN, but it’s not the same! For example Office 365 developer license wasn’t available in the program at the begging. And you have to also remember that you don’t get full Office 365 license. There’s no such option, and that was the question. Of course you still have Office professional 2013, which is awesome! Please find below a print screen from my BizPark portal, you will see what you can get from Microsoft.

BizSpark Menu

One more thing. You will receive two activation keys for Office 2013, and each of them can be use ten times. So you can have 20 installation for your employees. So for small company it’s really big thing. And if install Visual Studio, there’s no limits. So all your developers can use Visual Studio Ultimate. It’s really great…

Finally. I just get message that Office 2013 Service Pack 1 has been released. And I don’t write because of Office suit, but in terms of SharePoint. You can find more information here. And I don’t have a choice. I have to install it and test it. And I’ve seen a few cool things. Download link is here.
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Do you like jogging and do you have mobile phone running Widows Phone? If you do, I have have a got news for you. I just was checking my phone (Lumia 820) store applications and I found out that finally one of the best mobile application for runners is now available in Windows Phone store. Yes, that’s right Adidas miCoach can be installed for free on you Windows phone device. Great move Microsoft. Now, it’s time to Nike+ application…
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A few weeks ago I wrote a post about free training “Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Core Solutions” on MVA portal. And If you are SharePoint 2013 developer it was “have to see” event. Now I just discovered that guys shared another event which is absolutely worth to see! Please check this link and you will another training: Developing SharePoint Server Advanced Solutions Jump Start. Aim to pass the 70-489 exam but don’t know what to study? Check this out!